Serendipity: Towards a Taxonomy and a Theory

Yaqub, Ohid

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2841236

Cited by 24 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 65 publications

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“…The European Research Council has recently given to the biochemist Ohid Yaqub a 1.7 million US dollars grant to quantify the role of serendipity in science [65]. Yaqub found that it is possible to classify serendipity into four basic types [66] and that there may be important factors affecting its occurrence. His conclusions seem to agree with ideas developed in earlier works [67,68,69,70,71,72] which argues that the commonly adopted -apparently meritocratic -strategies, which pursuit excellence and drive out variety, seem destined to be loosing and inefficient.…”

Section: Serendipity Innovation and Efficient Funding Strategiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Talent Versus Luck: The Role of Randomness in Success and Failure

Pluchino

Biondo

Rapisarda

2018

Advs. Complex Syst.

102

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The largely dominant meritocratic paradigm of highly competitive Western cultures is rooted on the belief that success is due mainly, if not exclusively, to personal qualities such as talent, intelligence, skills, smartness, efforts, willfulness, hard work or risk taking. Sometimes, we are willing to admit that a certain degree of luck could also play a role in achieving significant material success. But, as a matter of fact, it is rather common to underestimate the importance of external forces in individual successful stories. It is very well known that intelligence (or, more in general, talent and personal qualities) exhibits a Gaussian distribution among the population, whereas the distribution of wealth -often considered a proxy of success -follows typically a power law (Pareto law), with a large majority of poor people and a very small number of billionaires. Such a discrepancy between a Normal distribution of inputs, with a typical scale (the average talent or intelligence), and the scale invariant distribution of outputs, suggests that some hidden ingredient is at work behind the scenes. In this paper, with the help of a very simple agent-based toy model, we suggest that such an ingredient is just randomness. In particular, we show that, if it is true that some degree of talent is necessary to be successful in life, almost never the most talented people reach the highest peaks of success, being overtaken by mediocre but sensibly luckier individuals. As to our knowledge, this counterintuitive result -although implicitly suggested between the lines in a vast literature -is quantified here for the first time. It sheds new light on the effectiveness of assessing merit on the basis of the reached level of success and underlines the risks of distributing excessive honors or resources to people who, at the end of the day, could have been simply luckier than others. With the help of this model, several policy hypotheses are also addressed and compared to show the most efficient strategies for public funding of research in order to improve meritocracy, diversity and innovation.

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Section: Serendipity Innovation and Efficient Funding Strategiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Talent Versus Luck: The Role of Randomness in Success and Failure

Pluchino

Biondo

Rapisarda

2018

Advs. Complex Syst.

102

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“…A stream of research has examined the effect of team collaboration on the creativity of research, emphasizing that creativity is the outcome of individuals' interactions within a team (Shin & Jang, 2017). Interactions, collaborative networking, and information exchange might result in serendipitous discoveries in basic science, applied research and technological development activities (Yaqub, 2018). Uzzi et al (2013) indicated that papers written in collaboration are 37.7% more likely than those of single authors to introduce novel combinations into conventional knowledge domains.…”

Section: Creativity In Sciencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Sometimes researchers make unexpected and beneficial discoveries, an occurrence termed serendipity (Yaqub, 2018). Serendipity takes different forms.…”

Section: Creativity In Sciencementioning

confidence: 99%

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Creativity in science and the link to cited references: Is the creative potential of papers reflected in their cited references?

Tahamtan

Bornmann

2018

Journal of Informetrics

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Several authors have proposed that a large number of unusual combinations of cited references in a paper point to its high creative potential (or novelty). However, it is still not clear whether the number of unusual combinations can really measure the creative potential of papers. The current study addresses this question on the basis of several case studies from the field of scientometrics. We identified some landmark papers in this field. Study subjects were the corresponding authors of these papers. We asked them where the ideas for the papers came from and which role the cited publications played. The results revealed that the creative ideas might not necessarily have been inspired by past publications. The literature seems to be important for the contextualization of the idea in the field of scientometrics. Instead, we found that creative ideas are the result of finding solutions to practical problems, result from discussions with colleagues, and profit from interdisciplinary exchange. The roots of the studied landmark papers are discussed in detail.

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“…Yet without some degree of secrecy, researchers themselves appear to believe that the cycle of ‘publish or perish’ cannot be maintained, bringing with it the career advancement necessary for good researchers to continue in their field. Boutron and Ravaud’s () paper presented at the 2017 Sackler Colloquium on Reproducibility of Research highlighted how the competitive nature of modern research has resulted in the rise of ‘spin’. The phrase is adopted from the political world and calls into question the idealized version of how research and research communication is done – and which is common in the publishing industry – and instead shows the ethical boundaries that researchers must approach each time they prepare for publication. Yaqub () and Cook () offered different perspectives on the role of serendipity and chance in research advancement. The former offers a clear typography of serendipity and a theoretical framework in which to understand the phenomenon, while the latter brings serendipity into the library and readership context and offers a vision of the future for VR‐based literature discovery.…”

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confidence: 99%